Cyber Literature

The paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

Alfred Hitchcock

Cyber Literature, flagged in red zigzag lines on my spell check, is viewed with a sneer by most readers of hard copy books- sneer is being gracious. Let's try disdain. People beam and a smile rises when they learn I'm an author. I proudly describe how my books are sold on-line. I talk about the instant access and the availability to enhance book jackets with a variety of links to more in-depth audio, video, .JPG images, and raw data. And I tell them I have recorded some of my books with a multi-track, digital program. I make the recording sound like an old time radio broadcast. The smile slowly drops and a vagueness envelops a more than quizzical look. Then a gulp. "But ... have you been published, you know, published?"

Let's look back to how the written and spoken word has evolved. Way back when- some of our ancestors were born with added capacities in their brain. The guttural sounds in their throats were transformed into rudimentary forms of language. Those throwbacks, controllers of the pack or the village tough guys were certainly amused. It is believed that the Australopithecus line were more animal in their language proficiency than human.

Desmond Fearnley-Sander reviewed, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon.

Deacon convincingly argues for a very different story. He sees language as evolving slowly in fits and starts over a period of two million years or more. He suggests that our ape-like ancestors prior to that, the australopithecines, had the kinds of communication capabilities that can be observed today in apes and monkeys. They made sounds or signs of aggression and appeasement, sounds or signs to warn and perhaps to comfort. Relics of those primitive calls persist in humans to this day, for example in the tongue clicking and other noises that we use when we communicate with babies.

Diverted human lines such as the Neanderthals stayed within their own enclaves and eventually petered out. My guess is those non-speaking humans were threatened by the advance. Enter the Gracile Australopithecines, Robust Australopithecines, Homo habilis, Homo Erectus ...

Newer, More Improved!

Homo habilis "The Handyman" - possible direct human ancestor - 50% more Brain Capacity over australopithecines ~590 cc. + -Speaks without grunting -Uses common sense (sometimes)

The Evolutionary Time Line

A change occurred over the millennia. Maybe mankind should have continued babbling and no one should have constructed an alphabet or have written symbols. The hangers-on died and humans beings WROTE and SPOKE. Ask the Sumerians.

The earliest known writing comes from Uruk and has been dated to about 3,300BC. It took the form of 'word-pictures' drawn with a stylus on tablets of damp clay. Each word-picture represented an object. Much later, the complete system had more than 700 signs. Tablets measured about 5cm wide and 2cm thick.

Did the Egyptians balk at parchment? Maybe they did; keeping their hieroglyphic stone symbols sealed in the pyramids.

But somebody saw the light, pounded parchment for writing purposes and put those Medieval monks to work.

Enter the metal craftsman ...

Oh, Gutenberg did you have these problems when you took to press? Were all the doubters lined up outside your workshop, doubting your validity because you weren't upstairs copying manuscripts by hand?

Gutenberg

In the early 1500's Aldus Manutius in Venice printed thousands of relevant volumes and made the great works small, cheap, and accessible to the world.

The complex changes fueled by computers and the Internet have spawned a cyber universe where everyone and everything can be immediately posted to the world. This astonishing and rapid development has taken many people (the scribes with their pens) by surprise. Manutius would have understood this power.

Instant accessibility has its drawbacks. A barrage of material, written, audio, and video, has surged into a cyber glut. As a reader I ask: why should I go scouring the web when books stores have already used professional editors and established publishers to sift and select the proper works? Good question. Publishers survive by selling books to large and medium sized markets, but the web can direct writing to specific readers. An entire new reading realm has opened up.

The Fitton Chronicles
ebooks by Robert P. Fitton

I thought about only thumb tacking one or two books up for sale., but concluded that strategy was certain death. By putting my entire sideshow out there I allowed the reader a depth and choice that most bookstores can't offer. How many bookstore chains offer every book of every author on the shelf? Forget it. Can you pick up a book jacket in a book store and be linked to relevant web sites, audio, and video? On the web you can instantly have e-Books by clicking in your pajamas.
The remedy to the smearing of Cyber Literature is time. I believe people make market decisions every day and are smart enough to sift through the cyber pile. My generation, the Baby Boomers, and even the X-ers will fade away as did the generations before printing, the first automobiles, and television. In the not too distant future the evolution of the web will be the medium and this column that I write at my desk on a cool, fall New England evening will seem strangely archaic.

"But ... have you been published, you know, published?"